Spiritual Warfare | Lost and Found Again

Spiritual Warfare | Lost and Found Again

When my wife read this out, I recalled an incident that had occurred in the spring of 2016. At the time, I hadn’t yet properly investigated Almighty God’s work of the last days. I was driving my wife and one of the sisters from the church to another state. On the way, we stopped so that my wife could attend to something, and when she got out of the car that sister also got out. It was cold and windy outside, and the sister stood beside the car stamping her feet to keep warm. I called to her to get in the car but she said: “It’s okay. I’ll stand outside for a bit.” It was quite a while before my wife returned, and only then did the sister get back into the car. Seeing that she was visibly shivering from the cold my wife asked her: “It’s so cold outside. Why didn’t you stay in the car?” She replied: “There’s an administrative rule in our church that a man and a woman can’t be alone together or have physical contact. This is one of the requirements that God has of His chosen people, and we have to strictly abide by it.” On hearing this, I felt that the people with The Church of Almighty God truly are different from the people of the world — even in such trivial matters they keep themselves in check. With this in mind, I couldn’t help but smack my head in self-disgust for not properly investigating the facts and instead blindly believing those online rumors. When I thought about all of the times I’d interacted with the brothers and sisters of The Church of Almighty God and seen how clearly delineated the boundaries between men and women were, how proper and decent they were in speech and action, how principled they were when associating with people or attending to affairs, it was obvious that those rumors online didn’t hold any water. At that point I felt very ashamed — it turned out that those online rumors were all fabrications, slander, outright distortion — yet I blindly took in those lies and developed doubts about Almighty God and The Church of Almighty God. I was such a confused idiot! My wife then continued on in fellowship: “In the last days, God becoming flesh and expressing truths to judge and cleanse people is to thoroughly save mankind from Satan’s domain and to rid us of our corrupt dispositions — our arrogance, trickery, deceit, selfishness, vileness, evil, and filth — and to help us to achieve transformation in our life disposition so that we may live out a true human likeness. God knows that mankind has been very deeply corrupted by Satan and doesn’t have the capability to overcome sin; so in order to ensure that people don’t offend God’s disposition when they are accepting God’s salvation and thus be eliminated and punished, God has laid out the administrative rules of the Age of Kingdom in order to keep believers in check. Anyone who violates these rules will be punished by God, and serious offenders will be expelled from the church and lose any chance of salvation. God issuing these decrees for the church is to have us gain some real knowledge of God’s unoffendable righteous disposition, and also so that we have rules to keep us in check. This way, in all of our behaviors there will always be a line that can’t be crossed, and if we keep within these boundaries then we can avoid many of Satan’s temptations. This is God’s way of protecting us and, even more so, it is God’s true love for us!” Listening to my wife’s fellowshiping I found myself involuntarily nodding my head, and thus the knot in my heart was completely untied and the pain suffocating my heart was released. After that, I started attending church meetings again.

Every time I recall this experience there is always some lingering fear in my heart. I saw how damaging these rumors are; I was nearly taken in by them and almost lost the chance for God’s salvation of the last days. In the Age of Grace, the Israelites were also deluded by false rumors and did not acknowledge the Lord Jesus as the coming of the Messiah. They rejected the Lord Jesus and thus lost the Lord’s salvation. This made me realize just what huge obstacles such rumors are on the path of true faith! But what I still couldn’t make heads or tails of was why there are so many false rumors and false accusations about The Church of Almighty God online when it clearly is a good church. So, during one of the church gatherings I brought up this question with the brothers and sisters so that we could openly fellowship on it. They played one of the church’s gospel movies for me, Break Through the Snare, which completely resolved my confusion. With a bit more fellowshiping from the brothers and sisters I gained even more clarity. Using rumors to disrupt and sabotage God’s work has been Satan’s consistent tactic. When the Lord Jesus was doing His work, the Jewish chief priests, scribes and Pharisees wanted to ensure that they kept permanent control over God’s chosen people, and so they created many false rumors about the Lord Jesus. They blasphemed the Lord Jesus by saying that He relied on Beelzebub’s power to exorcise demons, they falsely accused the Lord Jesus of not letting people pay their taxes to Caesar, and they also gave false testimony by saying that the Lord Jesus’ physical body was stolen by His disciples and that He hadn’t been resurrected. I’m sure that if the Internet had existed then, those religious leaders would have put all of their rumors and false testimonies online in order to blaspheme, attack, and condemn the Lord Jesus. Nowadays, in the Age of Kingdom, Almighty God is doing the work of words to judge and cleanse mankind; the government of China as well as the pastors and elders in the religious community are acting as Satan’s tools. In order to achieve their goal of controlling and ensnaring people, they are blaspheming and condemning Almighty God, wantonly fabricating rumors and false testimonies, and smearing The Church of Almighty God in order to confuse people and keep them in the dark. In their arrogance, they think they can make people abandon God’s work of salvation of the last days and follow them in resisting God. Satan really is just so evil and loathsome!

Then the brothers and sisters read out another two passages of God’s words for me: “On earth, all manner of evil spirits are endlessly on the prowl for a place to rest, are ceaselessly searching for the corpses of men to eat up” (“Chapter 10” of God’s Words to the Entire Universe in The Word Appears in the Flesh). “Satan is constantly devouring the knowledge that men hold of Me in their hearts, and constantly, with teeth bared and claws unsheathed, engaged in the last throes of its death struggle. Do you wish to be captured by its deceitful stratagems at this moment? Do you wish, at the moment that the last phase of My work is completed, to cut off your own life?” (“Chapter 6” of God’s Words to the Entire Universe in The Word Appears in the Flesh). They also shared fellowship with me that Almighty God’s words tell us the truth about the spiritual battle, which is that in order to block people from coming before God and swallow them up, Satan carries out all sorts of trickery. This includes the deception of spreading rumors and false testimonies on the Internet, getting religious leaders to harass and threaten believers, and getting family members to coerce them and prevent them from following Almighty God. In short, anything which makes us doubt, deny or move away from God comes from Satan. If we are unable to seek the truth, then we will never be able to see through Satan’s trickery, will easily lose the chance to gain God’s salvation, and will sink into disaster along with Satan. Thanks to God’s leadership, I was able to more clearly see Satan’s evil and despicable essence and see through Satan’s schemes through watching The Church of Almighty God’s gospel movie and listening to the fellowshiping of the brothers and sisters.

Since following Almighty God I’ve gained true release and freedom. Now, whenever I encounter difficulties I can read God’s words and pray to God to help me find a path of practice. The brothers and sisters in the church all abide by God’s requirements and seek to become honest people. Their mutual relationships are uncomplicated and open; they help and support each other. There’s no need to worry about someone trying to put me down, deceive me, or rip me off. I feel truly happy and content, and this is the life that I always want to live.

Source From: The Church of Almighty God